


Upon the Blinding Dust of the Earth

by withthebreezesblown



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Family Dynamics, Mages and Templars, honestly probably my favorite thing i’ve written, i really love my canon inquisitor's father okay?, so i wrote him his own ficlet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-20
Updated: 2019-05-20
Packaged: 2020-03-08 16:12:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,155
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18898138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/withthebreezesblown/pseuds/withthebreezesblown
Summary: Too many times to count, Edwin Trevelyan did not cry. Twice he did.





	Upon the Blinding Dust of the Earth

Edwin Trevelyan has never been a man given to tears. Even before his first draught of lyrium, he isn’t one to cry, and after, when everything seems so doubtless, he can’t imagine anything could reduce him to such weakness. The world had come rushing at him with that dose of doubtlessness, brighter and louder and _more_ than he’d been prepared for, even with the warning his uncle had tried to give him, more honest than anything that had ever been told to him during formal training, and he met it, unflinching, stoic. He certainly hadn’t felt any sentimentality at his promotion either to Knight-Captain, or, only years later, to Knight-Commander. As the third son of Aston Trevelyan, his older brothers had been raised from birth to breed horses and play the Game. Like his younger brother, Edwin had been raised for this. For the templars. And he has never envied his older brothers their fate. The things for which he has a deft talent–handling a sword, brutal honesty, tactless assessment–would never have served him well as a member of the gentry. The only thing he misses in the Circle are the Trevelyan horses, the finest Imperial Warmbloods bred anywhere in Thedas.

From time to time he attends one of his brother’s galas, if only with the hopes of wringing from a drunk noble some favor or gift for the Circle. He had convinced Lord Howard to send a cart full of the oranges grown on his land at Satinalia one year. The mages’ wide-eyed delight had been well worth an evening’s discomfort amidst pompous fools. At one such event, not long after his promotion to Knight-Commander, he hears it said, as casually as though it is acknowledged fact, that his position has been bought with Trevelyan money. Though it isn’t the truth, his name has opened doors for him, he knows that, and somehow the slight gives all the more offense for it. He’s so angry his ears burn red, angry enough still when he returns to the Circle that night after hours of silent fuming to destroy not one but two of the practice dummies in the training yard–but there are damn well no tears.

Even at the funeral for his oldest brother, as he watches the pyre disintegrate in the flames, fists clenched, eyes glassy, he does not let the tears fall. At the next funeral he attends, grief for the loss of his second oldest brother warring with grief for the lands he’d grown up on, the horse-filled lands that had belonged to his family for six hundred years and now would no longer, he had still not cried. When the Revered Mother had come to him days later, telling him that he, who had his whole life been neither heir nor spare, always meant for the templars, was being released from his vows, from his duties, from his Order, to administer his family lands, to take up the title of Bann–because, after all, it would not do to have a _Tevinter_ inherit the estate that had shown such devotion to the Chantry, in both money and blood, for six centuries–he had nearly cried, with impotent rage, with frustration. They had not even asked him his opinion. He is not ignorant, but he has always seen the world through the filter of privilege that comes with being a Trevelyan. He had understood that the Chantry cared less than it pretends for the mages bound to it. He had not understood that he himself, after all his sacrifices and devotion, meant no more to them than the mages he had done his best to protect.

After that come the long years of struggling to unlearn the brashness of martial command, to pretend, at least, to learn the slithering, devious, deplorable art of the Game. Not once is there a moment that the unwanted burden feels worth its weight, not even on his morning ride across all that he has saved from the hands of some distant Tevinter relative, whose only crime, as far as he is aware, is having been born too far north. Desperate for somewhere to redirect all his wasted energy, he takes to breaking the wildest, most untamable horses himself. For this, and for the unsubtle honesty and unbidden impatience he cannot rid himself of, they call him the unbroken horse lord.

The first moment anything he must endure feels like it might be worth it is the night of the Teyrn’s fortieth birthday, an event he could not finagle himself out of without giving insult. So he glowers in a corner, drinking more wine than is, perhaps, strictly wise, but he doesn’t suspect anyone will brave the glare to come find out just how drunk he is. That is when he sees her. Later, whispering in her ear like a romantic fool he hadn’t known himself capable of being, no doubt helped along by the wine, he will tell her it was like a beam of light came shining down from the Golden City itself upon her, accompanied by the singing of the sweetest spirits. And, in the first stroke of luck the Maker has seen fit to bestow upon a Trevelyan since Edwin’s second brother died, she will laugh. Not the hard, broken glass sound that issues from the mouths of most of the ladies at events like these, but sweet and soft, like the sound of her skirt rustling when she turns to him to ask his name and give her own. After that night, though seldom where he can hear, they call Madeleine Lafaille the woman who broke the unbreakable horse lord.

He marries her two months later. When, less than a year after, his first son is placed in his arms, face still red and scrunched from his own tears, though the feeling of a father’s pride and joy is like nothing he could ever have imagined, he does not cry himself. Not then, and not at the births of the three boys that follow. When their fifth child comes early, a full two months before the midwife predicts, he calls for every healer and physician within a day’s ride with a calm that belies the panic he feels. Though they are, unanimously, appalled by the idea of his presence at the birthing, he refuses to leave his wife’s side. When they finally pull the babe, much too small, from between his wife’s legs, he holds his breath. He understands that babies are fragile, that even all the Trevelyan wealth can buy nothing to counter this fact, that the two of them have been lucky so far to have had four healthy children out of four pregnancies, and yet he finds he cannot breathe as he waits for _this_ child to draw its first breath. And then it does, with a shriek that shouldn’t even be possible of a creature so small. When he holds her, his first daughter, the first of his children to have their mother’s fair, red-blond hair, the only thing that stuns him more than the tininess of her is how close to tears he is in his desperate gratitude.

And that is when he understands that something is wrong. That neither healers nor physicians can stop his wife’s bleeding. It’s all happening too fast, and there is no time for the rage or the fury or the tears that will follow. Madeleine is terrified, and so he cannot be. She’s terrified, and then she’s looking up at him, pale, whispering, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” and all he can say is, “It’s okay. It’s okay,” again and again until she’s gone. It isn’t okay. He weeps like a child. He weeps as he has never wept, even as a child.

When the tears finally stop, he doesn’t believe he will ever shed another.

 

 

He names the baby Evelyn, because it was the name Madeleine had chosen, for a great-aunt, she said, who had stolen her own dowry, bought a sword, and become a mercenary. He’d had no intention of agreeing to so… inauspicious a namesake before. In her absence, he finds himself desperate to do anything that would have pleased his wife, as though, if only he can make her happy enough, she will return to him.

Though she grows fast, to him, his daughter will always be a tiny, fragile thing he nearly lost. She’s a strange, changeable child, equally happy sitting in a saddle in front of her oldest brother, Harry, and chasing Owen off the cliffs that he’s told them both are too high to jump from, shrieking with delight the whole fall to the sea below, or sitting quietly in Julian’s lap, reading along with him historical texts that should be not only far too boring but far too advanced for her. It’s her youngest brother that she is most inseparable from though. Tristan calls her Evil One and messes her hair, particularly if the maids have done something with it that pleases her, but he also makes up stories for her at night until she falls asleep, and Edwin has seen him step between his sister and village boys thrice his size when her mouth gets away from her, as it has a habit of doing when it isn’t shut tight.

She’s seven when he finds the world breaking and rearranging itself around him again. There’s the sound of her wild laughter, which is a usual enough thing and wouldn’t have attracted much attention on its own. What catches him is Tristan’s voice calling after her, frantic, panicked, calling her by her proper name, not Evil One, not Princess Eva, just, “Evelyn!” with a pleading desperation that echoes down the hall past his door. So he follows, out of the house and into the rose garden, where he falls to his knees and forgets how to breath. Because it is halfway through Haring, and in the middle of a garden full of frost and the brown winter sleep of things that shouldn’t bloom for months is a path of new green leaves and fat white rosebuds, about to open in the weak winter sun, and at the end of it his son has finally caught his daughter, arms wrapping around her, pinning her own to her sides as he looks at the garden around them. “Maker, Evelyn, what have you done?” He hasn’t seen their father at the other end of the garden yet, and the man doesn’t realize that the boy’s tone isn’t the shock he’s feeling himself, only despair, until he practically cries, “ _I can’t hide this_!”

The boy who has not noticed him has noticed what he himself has failed to: two stable hands staring, the pale, wide eyed face of the head cook in the kitchen window, another of a maid in a window above her.

The single greatest shock he receives that day is the one he gives himself when he finds his mouth quietly echoing his son. “I cannot hide this.” Later, he will wonder what he might have done differently if he could have. He will wonder with terror and disgust. He, of all people, who knows why the Circle is necessary, who knows that no one suffers more than the child when some fool noble tries to hide the magic that, untrained, can’t be held back, and he would wish no such thing on his daughter. But she is different from his dark haired boys, a piece of her mother that is all he has left, and if he’d had half the chance, the idea of what he might have done to keep her with him frightens him. Not to hide the shame of her magic, which is so often the case. He understands how magic works, grasps as well as any educated man who isn’t a fool can where magic comes from, or at least where it doesn’t: that it certainly isn’t a punishment from the Maker.

The moment she catches sight of him over the arms restraining her and calls out, “Daddy,” finally infected with her brother’s fear and despair herself, he knows that _shame_ will never be something he feels for his daughter. Lost completely for words, he can only hold out his arms. There’s a long moment when her brother doesn’t release her, when, if anything, he seems to be holding her tighter, struggling to turn her, to put himself between her and their father, not unlike he’s seen his son do with the village boys. And then the boy deflates, shoulders slumping, arms falling limply to his sides as his sister runs to their father’s open arms.

When he wraps his arms around her, face lowering to the fair copper of her hair, he discovers he was wrong years ago, the day she was born. The tears he shed that day were not to be his last.


End file.
